On 6 May 1999, Scotland voted for its first parliament in nearly 300 years. One year on, what does this momentous event mean for scientists in Scotland? Hilary Marshall reports. At the time of the election, the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh presented a number of recommendations to the new Scottish Executive. Firstly, that the Parliament adopt an explicit policy to sustain Scotland's rol...
WASHINGTON, D.C.--Scientists who also practice medicine are becoming an "endangered species," a group of bench researchers said yesterday. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) called upon the government to do more to support the careers of "physician-scientists," who provide a key link between the lab and the clinic, the FASEB group said. If nothing reverses trend...
Forty new research posts have been created in Scotland's leading university departments and research institutions as a result of the latest round of awards from the Proof of Concept Fund. Established in 1999 by Scottish Enterprise in partnership with the Scottish Executive, the 3-year, £11 million fund was designed to support the commercialisation of cutting-edge research and technologies in acad...
BA FESTIVAL OVERVIEW I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this year's British Association Festival of Science, which took place in Glasgow last week. On the one hand there was a quest by scientists to find the world's funniest joke, and on the other, dire warnings about the dangers of mobile phones, an increase in the incidence of new variant CJD, climate change, and cosmic threats to Earth i...
Several British universities have recently established centres of scientific enterprise excellence to develop the entrepreneurial talents of scientists with commercial leanings. Undergraduate and postgraduate students will have the opportunity to learn entrepreneurship skills alongside traditional coursework and research activity. And the hope is that postdocs and lecturers will also be infected ...
When people ask me what I do and I reply that I am a scientist, they often seem perplexed. The reason for their confusion is that, apparently, I "don't look like a scientist." Could this failure to conform to the scientific norm seriously blight my career prospects? Is fashion an irrelevance in the intellectually superior world of science? Isn't it about time scientists shook off their scruffy im...
BA FESTIVAL OVERVIEW Green chemistry was a red-hot topic at this year's British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival in Glasgow. Why? Well, chemistry-based industries are under increasing pressure from both society and governments to clean up their act. And green chemistry involves the design, manufacture, and use of environmentally benign chemical products via processes tha...
Picture the scene: It's the end of another long day pushing back the frontiers of science and a pipettes-at-dawn scenario is erupting over at the PCR machine. The assertive, aggressive, know-all (AAK) Ph.D. student, not known for his patience even when things are going his way, is arguing with the trusty, pig-headed technician (TPT) over who should get to use the machine first. The AAK is just ab...
Two exciting new projects being developed in Glasgow aim to raise the profile of science and technology and create economic wealth for the area. CityScience and the Glasgow Science Centre will bring numerous science-based job opportunities to Western Scotland as well as encourage small businesses to make better use of the local scientific expertise available to them. The £60 million CityScience d...
Fed up with life at the bench but still love research? Interested in the business world but not sure how to bridge the gap between academia and commerce? A career in the growth area of commercialisation could be for you. Commercialisation (or technology transfer) is the exploitation of science and technology to create wealth. This process involves the use of intellectual property, generated withi...
BA FESTIVAL OVERVIEW From building bones to fabricating flesh, tissue engineering is a growth area, and it was the focus of much attention at this year's British Association Festival of Science. Defined as the harnessing of living processes to achieve healing and repair of damaged and diseased tissues by Tim Hardingham, director of the UK Centre for Tissue Engineering, it is a field that requires...
I believe the world is divided into two types of people: those who make lists and those who don't. If you're one of the latter and have just read Andrea Lord's article, you will be quaking in your boots at the very thought that thesis writing could entail this amount of organisation. Nonlistmakers know that these organisational methods make a lot of sense. It's just putting it into practice that ...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Bruce Lahn won third place in Merrill Lynch Forum's first annual Innovation Grants Competition for his proposal to create a male oral contraceptive. lahn1.jpg Most young scientists will eagerly pursue a challenge, and geneticist Bruce Lahn is no exception. However, he doesn't limit himself to stalking the obvious challenges. He also searches out the kind of challenge tha...
BA FESTIVAL OVERVIEW Organic farming may involve a lot of manure, but with organic products occupying more and more shelf space in our supermarkets, a session at this year's BA Festival of Science set out to show that organic farming doesn't deserve its low-tech image. In fact, claimed the session's speakers, these days a lot of scientific research is going into the development of organic systems...
Protecting human research subjects is hot stuff right now--one only needs to look as far as the cover story of the 22 April 2002 issue of Time magazine entitled "At Your Own Risk." Indeed, I would argue that the United States is experiencing a national crisis of public trust in academic research involving human subjects. This crisis has been ignited by the deaths of research subjects at two prest...
Reposted from Science magazine , October 4, 2002 Douglas Robinson, like his peers, spent his 20s in training. After 5.5 years in graduate school, he received a Ph.D. in cell biology and then worked another 4.5 years as a postdoc under a faculty mentor. When he was 31, he got an appointment at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, enabling him for the first time to apply for his...
Are you the sort of person who has trouble finding the on/off switch on computers? Do you quiver with dread at the sight of a new piece of equipment or machinery, which you not only need to turn on but actually have to use? Have you given up all hope of working out how to programme the video machine? If the answers to the last three questions are yes, welcome to the world of the technophobe. Most...
Are scientists in the UK lagging behind their European counterparts in taking advantage of the opportunities to study abroad and learn another language? Mr. John Reilly, director of the UK Socrates-Erasmus programme, has warned that students in the United Kingdom will be unable to compete with their European peers unless more is done to promote the benefits of time spent studying abroad. In 1999/...
It may be a bit early to say that there will be a rich harvest of career opportunities for women in science, but at the Athena dissemination conference held at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh last month it seemed that the seeds of change are starting to be sown. The Athena Project, which is a UK-wide initiative that aims to increase the number of women working in science, engineering, and tec...
